I don't entirely disagree, but the first thing that this article brought to mind is the old cliche "wherever you go, there you are". I'm 34, lots of ex girlfriends and lots of past cities. There's a fine line between breaking out of the status quo hamster wheel and running away from your baggage.
Moving cities, or relationships, or jobs isn't worth as much if you aren't simultaneously working on yourself
> Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.
Seneca, 2000 years ago
More people should read the classics, lots of wisdom you can speed run instead of discovering you fucked up the better part of your youth chasing ghosts
Thanks for replying- I completely agree. Which writing is that quote from and/or any goods tips for where to start with Seneca for someone who didn't study the classics in college?
It sounds like this author believes in going really big. They didn't move cities, they moved continents. They didn't date and break up, they married and divorced.
I think there is something to be said for getting some big experiences. Moving from Pittsburgh to Cleveland might be a waste of energy. Moving from Pittsburgh to Paris is a guaranteed adventure.
I don't know if I agree or not, but it is interesting to think about.
It’s interesting that a lot of people don’t like big changes, because I’m generally the exact opposite. If I haven’t had a big change in a few years, I start feeling really anxious—like I’m letting life pass me by. Most people crave constancy and routine; I seem to crave novelty and adventure.
To your example, I moved from North Carolina to Paris when I was 3, and ever since then have wanted to go more places. It’s a bit different when you have other people who depend on you though. We moved from the southeast to the Bay Area a while back, and the experienced rattled my wife a lot, as she had lived in the same small hometown for 30 years. I suppose it is her turn for now; with remote work we moved right back to her small hometown next to her parents while our children are young. But two years into this and I’m already itching to move to Norway or Tokyo...
While moving from Pittsburgh to Paris to Hong Kong to Singapore to Berlin to Cape Town is more likely a waste of energy again and risks burning you (not mentioning the planet) out. It's a lot easier to turn the adventure-o-meter up than to turn it down.
Going big and blowing it up - what is there not to like? Going big requires investments and while there is a sunk cost fallacy there is also compound interest. Most larger endeavors have investments from more than one participant - and it often needs just one person to blow it all up. Last but not least: All big investment require taking on risk and you ability to stomach those may decline over time - there is survivor bias in the tale of heroes.
There are long term consequences and without discussing how they relate to rewards of blowing big things up this feels a shallow self promoting piece to me.
Alan Watts was the one that was always saying, "the you that is trying to be better is the same you that needs improving." Try breaking out of that trap!
To some degree if you are going to change yourself for the better, you will already be doing it. It is a bit defeatist but also a little bit of truth.
It is like how some folks try desperately to learn an instrument or get better are writing or whatever. They have this grim determination that it is something that needs to be done. To some degree you need that push through but for many it is just the process of getting to the goal, not a means of self improvement.
What I mean by that is, look at those that just took to playing musical instruments as a child. It wasn't necessarily because they were forced to do so but because they had an innate drive to do it. The lessons and practice was just a means to improve on something they were already trying to do.
All the Gibbs brothers in The BeeGee's (and Andy) took to instruments before the age of 3, they didn't do it to be better, it was just something they did.
In creativity, unless you are a savant it takes grinding to increase your ability to match your taste.
If you started very young, then bravo, the grinding is out of the way and you were likely to be able to focus on the fun parts and have fewer distractions.
If you're starting as an adult, then it's gonna take some grit to get to a level you're satisfied with.
Blowing up your life is exactly that, a big frikin mistake.
I've made several decisions that later revealed themselves as life blowing. It's not worth it.
In youth it's easy to imagine that you have infinite tries to get it right. This is totally wrong. Decisions that set your life back years can only be overcome so many times, and never completely.
So, instead of blowing it up, add it up slowly year by year, increasing your traction and equity....
I was in the perfect place to do it at 48. I had no dependents, a stable marriage and a wife who was excited to go along for the ride with me and I had built up assets to take chances. Now that I think about it, it really wasn’t that risky. Remote was a thing and I figured worse case, someone would hire me as a consultant.
>There's a fine line between breaking out of the status quo hamster wheel and running away from your baggage.
Absolutely. I've had the urge to move from my hometown to escape baggage, mainly relationships. I've been close to pulling the trigger many times. But things got in the way and now I look back and I'm happy I didn't move. At least for that reason of escaping baggage. Odds are you'll have baggage anywhere you live if you live there long enough. Learning to grow and live with that baggage is part of being a human.
In certain contexts this is called “doing a geographic”. Notorious trap for people who look solely for external causes of their discontent and ignore internal.
There's an equivalent in personal finance where people think that a payrise will solve their money woes. Their habits remain, their discretionary spending scales up, and they usually continue on with the same problems.
It is fascinating to see old friends fall into this trap. Things seem great for the first few months but eventually the same old issues arise with time.
There is a stereo type in Australia that the British complain about the country once here. A big part of this is believed to be that they leave their country to start over in a place that looks completely different, start a new job and meet new people only to find that they fall into all the same issues. Rather than realize the issues are just a part of the society, they can tend to blame the country instead.
That said I used to work with someone from Nigeria, very smart fella, they had a lot of issues with the country but also understood why they left their country. All they said was "Different country, similar poison. Just pick your flavor." They fundamentally got the issue at hand.
"People travel to change themselves, but they only manage to change the scenery." (Not my quote, alas, and my memory has butchered it enough that I can't find the original.)
Except that traveling is already requiring change in a person, opposed to being stationary. You have to face new situations all the time - requiring a different state of alertness and consciousness.
And new sceneries have different people, climate etc. also literally changing people (microbiome for example).
So yes, some people travel to run away from problems they never dare to solve, but some people just like to be on the move, like our nomadic ancestors.
Encountering a foreign culture, with foreign ways of thinking and behaving, can stretch and change you by forcing you to encounter assumptions and habits you didn't even know you had.
I’ve mentioned the last year of my life on HN where my wife and I decided to get rid of everything we own that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases including our cars and we became “hybrid digital nomads”. We fly to different cities across the US and stay in midrange extended stay hotels and stay in our own “Condotel”[1] the other six months in Florida.
What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.
We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.
My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).
Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.
When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.
When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.
We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.
I've done this on a smaller, temporary scale and it wasn't for me. You end up spending a lot of your time planning, packing, unpacking and generally working around all the things you never have to think about when you just live where you want to live and do some traveling. Our life became meaningless chores that just ate away at all the interesting things we could be doing or wanted to be doing.
We’ve figured most of those things out. We always travel on Sunday. We unpack our clothes. Do an instacart order. Find the laundry facilities, gym and pool at the hotel and find something to do on the weekends. My wife takes care of the washing and folding clothes and she hangs out during the week with people in one of her fitness organizations (she’s a hobbyists fitness instructor), she will organize a playlist and be a “special guest instructor”.
We usually stay at an extended stay with a full kitchen. Finding things to do is part of the fun. I book hotels ouf a year in advance since you don’t pay until check out.
Right, so the "secret" to blowing up your life is just to have massive savings, income and rental property, so that instead of owning your possessions, you can just rent them for 2x the cost of ownership while being a digital nomad.
But my former home is rented to our son at a discount to its market value to help him out and it offsets most of the holding cost. But I still lose money. That’s the only thing that the extra money is going to - offset the mortgage.
Honestly, my fixed costs are actually lower than they were before I started working for BigTech when I was working as a journeyman CRUD developer making less than a returning intern got at my current company.
I was making $120K when I had my house built in the burbs in 2016 and paid 3.5% down with an FHA mortgage. I was the only one on the mortgage.
If I had still been making that, I would have sold my house that doubled in value over the past six years and paid cash for my place in Florida.
My total expenses including mortgage and all utilities is less than $3000 where I live now. I was paying more for my mortgage, utilities, maintenance.
Even without that, my 1250 square foot condo I bought in 2022 was the same price I paid to have my 3200 square foot house built in 2016.
The amount we pay for Uber or SixT is about the same as we paid for one car note + maintenance on an older car + car insurance.
It's not like OP said "Anyone can do it just like this!". It's just what they did. Is it really so shocking to you that richer people have more opportunities in their lives than poorer people?
Won't this get kinda boring after a little while? I guess I've been on enough business trips that constantly traveling to me seems stressful and boring. I liked looking forward to meeting coworkers though, so having some people like distant family or friends in these areas makes life more enjoyable. I guess I've also been somewhat forced/or I guess blessed to live in a different state for a while. You won't really get a good understanding of a place until you've lived there maybe 2-3 years and have driven all over and met different types of people in that culture. The first year I think is mostly adapting to the differences and handling culture shock if you move across the country.
I work during the week and my wife is a hobbyist fitness instructor and trains other instructors. She reaches out to people online before we go and goes to different gyms while I work and we do the normal “date night” things on the weekend finding interesting things to do in the city we are in. She makes friends everywhere and flies to conferences without me. I also travel for work (cloud consulting) occasionally.
Because $Life, we haven’t really traveled that much until last year.
The end game is to sell our house in Atlanta after our son moves out (he pays rent with two of his friends). Because I never want to be a traditional landlord again. I did that a decade ago, pay off our Condotel and it will be cash flow positive without a mortgage and then find some place to live the other six months. It will be another tax free state just to keep taxes simple. We are thinking about either Las Vegas or some place in Tennessee.
Packing and unpacking isn’t that bad once every three or four weeks. I have one suitcase that never gets unpacked except when I travel for work.
My girlfriend is an oncology social worker and sees patients who lament that they waited until retirement to fulfill all their dreams of travel, etc. and then got cancer and realized there's a big chance they will never achieve almost any of them.
For this reason we decided not to wait to live life and moved onto an RV two years ago and have visited 20 states and two Canadian provinces while I work full time and she works part time, both remotely, often over Starlink (as I type this now from a small RV park in the Yukon).
You're paying half your rent to property managers?! Stop this insanity. There is no such thing as a rental pool, unless it's literally a pool that is rented. What service are you using?
It literally is 300-400 units in a resort “hotel” and they rent out your unit as part of a pool of units. They do all of the marketing, replenishment of supplies for the kitchen, maintenance, payments etc. The units are rented out by the night just like a hotel when you aren’t there.
But you don’t understand the other part. I’ve done the landlord thing before. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. The entire purpose of it was never to make money. But to have a place to stay for six months, a legal residence in a state that didn’t charge taxes, and for it to pay for itself when we are not there.
When we leave every year, we pay a one time $110 cleaning fee and don’t think about the place again until we come back in six months. The income comes in the same account where the mortgage is paid automatically.
"Rental revenue is shared with the management company, and owners typically pay no upfront fees for management, which includes the marketing and reservation of the units.[citation needed] Typical monthly fees for units in the rental pool include FF&E (Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment) reserve and resort fee(s). Although the revenue splits between owner and management company do vary from project to project, most hover around 50 percent."
Are you documenting/journaling your interactions and experiences in the various cities that you visit with a view to drawing any conclusions? Or just enjoying the ride?
A developer creates a standard resort hotel and then sells individual units out as condos.
You can (and most people do) use the onsite property management company. All of the individual owners make their units available as inventory to the property management company when they are not staying there. The property manager should have an algorithm to ensure units are occupied equitably.
My price at home for mortgage and utilities at home is $3K. One fee pays all utilities.
I keep my monthly hotel stays around the same amount since my mortgage is covered e-bike we are traveling. I stay at more expensive places to “vacation” by using hotel loyalty points earned.
I also don’t have a separate “vacation budget” like most people. It’s spread out for six months. My goal was always to keep my budget to the same as it was when I was just a regular old “enterprise Dev”.
I had the same thought -- " yet another writing by someone who's advice is 'do what I did' without any consideration beyond their own limited experience". This is especially frustrating when it comes from someone 20, 30, 40 years younger who doesn't have the life experience, much less can speak to your own life and how it should be managed. It worked for you, great, but don't assume to proselytize as if you're spouting truth.
Reminds me of a colleague in her 20s giving advices on how to raise children, without having on her own. I promptly put her on my ignore list.
Parenting advices are the worst type, I never listen to them. Each family and child is different, you cannot attribute any result to anything, and we all have differing values.
Elder people have a lot to say and some (not all) have a lot of wisdom. However I agree that whatever advice you take and follow, you will end up making mistake in other areas, so at the end of the day you have to live your own life, realise your own mistake and correct them.
I am in my mid-30s and highly resistant to change; the article resonates. I'm not ready to leave my job (I have two more years of RSUs to collect), but I am moving houses within my city solely for the change of scenery and pattern. I expect in the next few years, unless I meet someone life-changing, that I will leave my city or even take a multi-year sabbatical until I feel the urge or need to go back to my profession.
Notable quotes:
>But for the relatively sane, by the time you’re mostly ready to leave a job, or a city, or a relationship, you probably have good reason to.
>At any given time, your motion is being constrained by an agglomeration of previous decisions made by a previous you, decisions that might have little to do with your current wants.
I think these are good points to consider if one is the kind of person who accumulates "stuff" or has existential anxiety.
This was a categorical statement about 20-somethings and as such isn't ad hominem. I would still say that if their advice was just as eloquently stated opposite.
It is interesting as the later I get into my 50s, I start thinking more and more how I should never listen to what people over 50 say.
Life is non-ergodic and the older you get the more you are over fit to a time that no longer exists.
At least youthful ignorance has a chance of actually being right. There is a pseudo-wisdom that comes with age that is almost always wrong going forward.
I love articles like this. The writer seems to have no idea they're revealing severe psychological trauma to the readers, and despite it they try to pass it off as sage life advice. Like telling everyone you spit in the soup at work but it helps strengthen people's immune systems so everyone should be unsanitary.
Severe trauma? Really? Didn’t see any mention of violence, sexual assault, prison time, or the like. These seem like totally prosaic life choices that more or less worked out fine for him in the end. Maybe the language is a bit overwrought but that could just be to punch things up for the reader.
He was unable to make and keep connections that he found valuable enough to preserve. He wrote a post about blowing up your life and barely concentrated on the biggest reason not to, to preserve your social connections and proximity to the people you love to spend time with.
I would be very surprised if this person did not have an "avoidant" attachment type.
I think you underestimate how severe the trauma of feeling disconnected from other humans can be.
I think the authors blog post conveys that he hasn't come to terms with the idea that "Wherever you go, there you are."
I think you're being a bit hyperbolic, but I agree with your general sentiment. Talk to some older people who have lived a very satisfying life and ask them what the secret is. I don't think you'll find that it's tearing down their life every few years. That's what tends to happen when you make a bunch of bad decisions and go too far down one leg of the maze before realizing you're now lost.
I think happiness comes from listening carefully to your inner intuition. Some unconscious part of your mind already knows what path you should go down. The more you align your conscious experience with that part of your mind, the less you'll find the need to blow up your life to reset.
This is just my empirical evidence - let me know if you disagree and have contrary information - but psychological traumas like this are increasing everywhere I look. In my local community, local country, globally, it's the same story basically: burnout, a need for a life blowup. I think it's clearly a growing trend, the old world just isn't working.
Alternatively, never blow up your life! Live near your family and lifelong friends, establish hardcore roots with your community, always be surrounded by love. A road less taken by the educated elites, but a happy and fulfilling road nonetheless.
"One doesn't realize in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied." ~ CS Lewis
I don't know the context of the quote and I know next to nothing about CS Lewis, but having blown my life up at one point and experienced freedom on a level few on this planet could achieve (health, money, time, and will) the quote rang very true for me.
I think some people grow up in a community and are rooted within that community, but those people are also subject to that community and there is no guarantee that that "community that surrounds you with love" is a good community.
"Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
I can't speak for racism or being an addict, but in the English speaking world I think lots of these issues are overplayed.
It's not uncommon for members of the trans community to recommend cutting off family members for acts as minor as accidental misgendering, while ignoring the very real harms of social isolation.
As a trans person who's lived in a multi-generational household where only one other member knew I was trans. I can personally attest that even being closeted can be a good tradeoff for many people.
Obviously in cases of violent queerphobia the calculus will be different, but I think people chronically underweigh community and make their own lives worse for it.
There's a reason for the modern resurgence of communes, and it's not just rent. After decades of increasing social isolation we're finally coming back to the realisation that we're social monkeys.
>"community that surrounds you with love"
This hurts a bit for those who broke out of a toxic or at least not so loving community. I love your comment and I will add this citation to my favorites but it assumes that the ties and relationships are full of love, which I think is not the case for everyone.
> "Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
That quote is a great counter balance from the one in Fight Club, "Only when you have nothing, can you do anything."
One issue I have with the CS Lewis quote is I have been happy at both extremes. Tied down when I was younger was not for me, but now that I'm older I deeply appreciate all the ties I have. I'm not sure I would have gained this appreciation without taking the path it took to get here.
> "Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
Questioner of authority doesn't belong on that list. All the others are mainstream things with media and political advocacy behind them. The last is a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist".
30 years ago they all might have belonged together (expect we had less racism), 15 years ago I understand why people clung to the idea, today it doesn't make any sense.
When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back.
There’s debate. I’ve lost a lot of social fabric. I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends. But I’m millionaire, own my startup, own my house, and I can get advice on how to manage at work, get a psychologist, etc.
It’s not ideal, and ideally people would have recognized talent at home and/or just included me because I was a living person, but they didn’t seem to have this ethics. Travelling the world taught me what was necessary to give me the social chances that everyone had at home. Now I have weight. I’m not sure I’d have anyone’s respect without money and travels.
So: When home is broken anyway, do follow some dream, yours or not, travelling wasn’t even a dream for me, it will make you a broken soul with broken social fabric, but with more experience.
Completely agree with your perspective. Life is about making choices, and sometimes breaking out requires sacrificing certain aspects of our lives to gain momentum. When you dare to think and act differently, you become the odd one out, and your community may not accept you. But if you do break out and succeed, you reap the rewards you deserve, such as wealth and a home. However, it's often impossible to go back to the roots you left behind without even realizing it during the breakout. Personal growth happens along the way, even if others fail to see or understand it. Ultimately, it's crucial to trust your instincts and listen to your gut when deciding whether to break out or not. Thank you for this interesting discussion - inspiring.
> It’s not ideal, and ideally people would have recognized talent at home and/or just included me because I was a living person, but they didn’t seem to have this ethics.
What an egotistical thing to say. You're not entitled to have people waste time trying to "be friends with you" just because you're financially successful
> I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends.
You don't make friends and are workaholic because of it.
I traveled around the world for over a year because I wanted to experience more cultures - I found the same problems of humanity basically everywhere just in different shades. Anyway, a hack for you - if you want immediate respect, gain some muscles. It's possible your current presence is non-threatening and people subconsciously undervalue you due to the first impression.
> When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back.
Being someone who has the odd combination of seeing problems everywhere and yet willing to take risks, it was great for me to do so and break out of my cycle/neighbourhood/city and do things nobody in my family (and extended family) bothered to do. Some things spectacularly failed and left scars that will last a lifetime but taking those risks brought me to places/experiences and gave me a life radically different from my peers in my school/family/background. Its not radical as in taking war time photos as a profession and volunteering for UN between projects, but, sufficiently different from what most people back home are doing.
The trick is to take risks that you have thought about and are convinced about; so even when they don't work out, you are not cursing yourself that you did something you were not 100% willing to do.
Travelling will make you a broken soul? Then we must have been doing a very different kind of travelling around the world, for me it was the exact opposite. Literally the most enlighting experiences in my life, tons of personal growth.
And you meet tons of people even if you don't want to, do some cool extreme shit with them which can form bonds much stronger than years of just sitting next to each other in some cubicle/open space.
Also notably that onion article was published over 10 years ago in 2013. At least by 2020 (before remote work) that seemed impossible to fulfill given the increasingly competitive global capitalist system creating massive uncertainty (and causing taking pills and overdose) to everyone especially rural and those back home
I don't follow what relationship these two stories have with each other -- the first is on living in community and putting down roots, and the latter is on far-right cultural atavism.
Thank you for sharing that article. I had a good laugh reading it. It's essentially the life I'm trying to live, except I work remotely and earn a "city wage" while living in my rural home town.
Do you mean by being uprooted to different places as a child? This happened to me but I put down new roots and made long-term friends as an adult. I'd think the advice for people lacking roots would be the same as for anyone who lacks friends and/or has lost connections? There are also people who lived in an area all their life but maybe friends moved away etc and they found themselves lonely. Seems to me an answer is get involved with things - volunteering, sports, arts, music etc, and for those religious faith, get involved with that, church or otherwise, as long as its a diverse inclusive tolerant supportive community.
While it might be hard to grow roots, it is not impossible. IMO, you should start doing serious work on growing roots when you are in your late 20s.
Growing roots include:
- Getting married
- Having kids
- Settling down to live in one place
- Finding out how you can participate in the local community, and the actively participate
You will find that people are remarkably open to people who willingly contribute to other's well-being. This is how friends are made, this is how roots are grown.
I have to agree. For those people who have loving families that they can work with - realizing that EVERYONE has differences of opinion - staying near family is the single best thing you can do. You can have kids. Those kids can be around your parents and siblings and other relatives. Honestly it is true living. All else gravitates towards being too self centered.
I moved continents 12 years ago. I'm now happily married with a kid and have a life I love in my new home country. But I've only recently recognized the price I've paid in moving so far from my parents and siblings and what my daughter will miss out on because of it too.
Before you take Sasha Chapin's advice to blow up your life seriously, ask yourself whether you envy the life he's living.
> My existence really started getting good when I started blowing up my life more regularly, with a substantial eruption every couple of years. I quit my job and moved to Thailand without doing any research about the country, figuring that I could be a bartender again somewhere if it all went south. That ended up becoming the material for my first book. My current professional chapter began when I said “fuck it” to journalism when I couldn’t take the constant ethical compromises and the bullshit of pretending to care about the news cycle. After some flailing, I now make a lot more money and am a lot happier. Blowing up my first marriage was the most difficult one of all, but it was an obviously correct decision, for which my ex-wife later thanked me—we were locked in a pattern that was hurting both of us, and if one of us didn’t walk away, we would’ve eventually been one of those unhappy old couples who constantly radiate bitterness.
...because he switched careers and had a divorce? Not exactly a sign of a failed life, IMO. As a software engineer I feel damn lucky that I chose a career that I really like AND pays well; most people can't say the same. As for the divorce, you could get rich in a day if you knew how to reliably spot one of those coming early in a relationship.
In my case, I blew up my life every couple of years for the past 10 years or so; changing jobs and country. It gave me a good sense of what's out there and how things work on a global scale but it's been a roller-coaster experience without any net gains in the long run.
I'm like a bird floating in the updrafts to conserve energy but every time the wind changes suddenly, I have to start flapping my wings again and it feels harder each time.
Kind of shit advice really. No real data just, "well it worked for me". How many people blow up their life and end up homeless? How many actually improve their situation? How many end up back with their parents? Nothing other than I think it's good and it worked for me.
Here another way to look at this advice:
Everyday I run across the road without looking. It's exhilarating! It makes me feel ALIVE! I know all you naysayers say that I should look before crossing the road. I just rip off the band aid and fucking yolo it. I haven't been ran over by a car yet!
Really stupid. My advice is don't listen to this advice. If you are getting itchy feet go on a fucking holiday for a few weeks.
> Really stupid. My advice is don't listen to this advice. If you are getting itchy feet go on a fucking holiday for a few weeks.
You could also call this quite myopic. How do you know what is out there without trying it yourself? Sitting in your little world and poo poo'ing those who are willing to take a chance. Because yes, from their vantage point, OP is right.
There really is a world out there that few can find but it's worth looking for if you have good reasons to take a chance and put down new roots. Most don't make it because accepting any culture outside of the one of your birth is a very difficult task, and you will never have any true change until you accept a new culture: their customs, their values, their belief systems.
Because really there is quite a lot of variation in those things, and in all the travels I have had, I have only met a few who truly made it. And there is of course a loneliness that comes along with the change, at least for a while. That doesn't mean it isn't worth trying, and if you bit off more than you can chew, just go back home. You obviously need resources to do that, but it's not really as scary as you make it out to be.
Readit News
Moving cities, or relationships, or jobs isn't worth as much if you aren't simultaneously working on yourself
> Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.
Seneca, 2000 years ago
More people should read the classics, lots of wisdom you can speed run instead of discovering you fucked up the better part of your youth chasing ghosts
I think there is something to be said for getting some big experiences. Moving from Pittsburgh to Cleveland might be a waste of energy. Moving from Pittsburgh to Paris is a guaranteed adventure.
I don't know if I agree or not, but it is interesting to think about.
To your example, I moved from North Carolina to Paris when I was 3, and ever since then have wanted to go more places. It’s a bit different when you have other people who depend on you though. We moved from the southeast to the Bay Area a while back, and the experienced rattled my wife a lot, as she had lived in the same small hometown for 30 years. I suppose it is her turn for now; with remote work we moved right back to her small hometown next to her parents while our children are young. But two years into this and I’m already itching to move to Norway or Tokyo...
There are long term consequences and without discussing how they relate to rewards of blowing big things up this feels a shallow self promoting piece to me.
Dead Comment
To some degree if you are going to change yourself for the better, you will already be doing it. It is a bit defeatist but also a little bit of truth.
It is like how some folks try desperately to learn an instrument or get better are writing or whatever. They have this grim determination that it is something that needs to be done. To some degree you need that push through but for many it is just the process of getting to the goal, not a means of self improvement.
What I mean by that is, look at those that just took to playing musical instruments as a child. It wasn't necessarily because they were forced to do so but because they had an innate drive to do it. The lessons and practice was just a means to improve on something they were already trying to do.
All the Gibbs brothers in The BeeGee's (and Andy) took to instruments before the age of 3, they didn't do it to be better, it was just something they did.
If you started very young, then bravo, the grinding is out of the way and you were likely to be able to focus on the fun parts and have fewer distractions.
If you're starting as an adult, then it's gonna take some grit to get to a level you're satisfied with.
Blowing up your life is exactly that, a big frikin mistake.
I've made several decisions that later revealed themselves as life blowing. It's not worth it.
In youth it's easy to imagine that you have infinite tries to get it right. This is totally wrong. Decisions that set your life back years can only be overcome so many times, and never completely.
So, instead of blowing it up, add it up slowly year by year, increasing your traction and equity....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966
I was in the perfect place to do it at 48. I had no dependents, a stable marriage and a wife who was excited to go along for the ride with me and I had built up assets to take chances. Now that I think about it, it really wasn’t that risky. Remote was a thing and I figured worse case, someone would hire me as a consultant.
Absolutely. I've had the urge to move from my hometown to escape baggage, mainly relationships. I've been close to pulling the trigger many times. But things got in the way and now I look back and I'm happy I didn't move. At least for that reason of escaping baggage. Odds are you'll have baggage anywhere you live if you live there long enough. Learning to grow and live with that baggage is part of being a human.
There is a stereo type in Australia that the British complain about the country once here. A big part of this is believed to be that they leave their country to start over in a place that looks completely different, start a new job and meet new people only to find that they fall into all the same issues. Rather than realize the issues are just a part of the society, they can tend to blame the country instead.
That said I used to work with someone from Nigeria, very smart fella, they had a lot of issues with the country but also understood why they left their country. All they said was "Different country, similar poison. Just pick your flavor." They fundamentally got the issue at hand.
And new sceneries have different people, climate etc. also literally changing people (microbiome for example).
So yes, some people travel to run away from problems they never dare to solve, but some people just like to be on the move, like our nomadic ancestors.
What I haven’t talked about is what got us to this point. I grew up in a small town in southwest GA, moved to metro Atlanta in 1996 and stayed there until last year.
We had a house built in 2016 in the northern burbs and thought we had our “forever home”. All the time from 1996 -2020 I bumped around between 7 jobs as a journeymen “enterprise dev”.
My wife had lived in metro Atlanta all of her life. We got married in 2012 (both on our second marriage).
Everything changed in 2020. Our youngest son (my stepson) graduated from high school, Covid happened (didn’t fatally affect anyone in our inner or outer circle) and I fell into a remote job at BigTech.
When things got back to normal around 2021, we both realized that life is short and we wanted a change. That’s what caused us to blow up our life and we are both happier now that we really can’t acquire “stuff”.
When we left our condo in March to start our six month trip, we put it in the rental pool, it gets professional managed like a hotel room and we get half the rent to cover our mortgage.
We don’t own a car. We take Uber for six months once we hit a city and we have a Sixt subscription and we rent a car by the month when we are at home.
We usually stay at an extended stay with a full kitchen. Finding things to do is part of the fun. I book hotels ouf a year in advance since you don’t pay until check out.
Got it.
Just in case someone finds this "profound".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307059
But my former home is rented to our son at a discount to its market value to help him out and it offsets most of the holding cost. But I still lose money. That’s the only thing that the extra money is going to - offset the mortgage.
Honestly, my fixed costs are actually lower than they were before I started working for BigTech when I was working as a journeyman CRUD developer making less than a returning intern got at my current company.
I was making $120K when I had my house built in the burbs in 2016 and paid 3.5% down with an FHA mortgage. I was the only one on the mortgage.
If I had still been making that, I would have sold my house that doubled in value over the past six years and paid cash for my place in Florida.
My total expenses including mortgage and all utilities is less than $3000 where I live now. I was paying more for my mortgage, utilities, maintenance.
Even without that, my 1250 square foot condo I bought in 2022 was the same price I paid to have my 3200 square foot house built in 2016.
The amount we pay for Uber or SixT is about the same as we paid for one car note + maintenance on an older car + car insurance.
Because $Life, we haven’t really traveled that much until last year.
The end game is to sell our house in Atlanta after our son moves out (he pays rent with two of his friends). Because I never want to be a traditional landlord again. I did that a decade ago, pay off our Condotel and it will be cash flow positive without a mortgage and then find some place to live the other six months. It will be another tax free state just to keep taxes simple. We are thinking about either Las Vegas or some place in Tennessee.
Packing and unpacking isn’t that bad once every three or four weeks. I have one suitcase that never gets unpacked except when I travel for work.
For this reason we decided not to wait to live life and moved onto an RV two years ago and have visited 20 states and two Canadian provinces while I work full time and she works part time, both remotely, often over Starlink (as I type this now from a small RV park in the Yukon).
But you don’t understand the other part. I’ve done the landlord thing before. I would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. The entire purpose of it was never to make money. But to have a place to stay for six months, a legal residence in a state that didn’t charge taxes, and for it to pay for itself when we are not there.
When we leave every year, we pay a one time $110 cleaning fee and don’t think about the place again until we come back in six months. The income comes in the same account where the mortgage is paid automatically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condo_hotel
Are you documenting/journaling your interactions and experiences in the various cities that you visit with a view to drawing any conclusions? Or just enjoying the ride?
What rental pool service did you use?
You can (and most people do) use the onsite property management company. All of the individual owners make their units available as inventory to the property management company when they are not staying there. The property manager should have an algorithm to ensure units are occupied equitably.
What does this cost roughly?
I keep my monthly hotel stays around the same amount since my mortgage is covered e-bike we are traveling. I stay at more expensive places to “vacation” by using hotel loyalty points earned.
I also don’t have a separate “vacation budget” like most people. It’s spread out for six months. My goal was always to keep my budget to the same as it was when I was just a regular old “enterprise Dev”.
Reminds me of a colleague in her 20s giving advices on how to raise children, without having on her own. I promptly put her on my ignore list.
Parenting advices are the worst type, I never listen to them. Each family and child is different, you cannot attribute any result to anything, and we all have differing values.
I am in my mid-30s and highly resistant to change; the article resonates. I'm not ready to leave my job (I have two more years of RSUs to collect), but I am moving houses within my city solely for the change of scenery and pattern. I expect in the next few years, unless I meet someone life-changing, that I will leave my city or even take a multi-year sabbatical until I feel the urge or need to go back to my profession.
Notable quotes:
>But for the relatively sane, by the time you’re mostly ready to leave a job, or a city, or a relationship, you probably have good reason to.
>At any given time, your motion is being constrained by an agglomeration of previous decisions made by a previous you, decisions that might have little to do with your current wants.
I think these are good points to consider if one is the kind of person who accumulates "stuff" or has existential anxiety.
Personally I can find wisdom in 2 year olds babbling, as well as 90 years old. It depends on the person and time.
I discovered, that you can learn something from any person (even if it is, how not to do things). And age is not the determining factor.
Life is non-ergodic and the older you get the more you are over fit to a time that no longer exists.
At least youthful ignorance has a chance of actually being right. There is a pseudo-wisdom that comes with age that is almost always wrong going forward.
Such as?
I would be very surprised if this person did not have an "avoidant" attachment type.
I think you underestimate how severe the trauma of feeling disconnected from other humans can be.
I think the authors blog post conveys that he hasn't come to terms with the idea that "Wherever you go, there you are."
I think happiness comes from listening carefully to your inner intuition. Some unconscious part of your mind already knows what path you should go down. The more you align your conscious experience with that part of your mind, the less you'll find the need to blow up your life to reset.
Thoughts?
The Onion’s take: https://www.theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfil...
I don't know the context of the quote and I know next to nothing about CS Lewis, but having blown my life up at one point and experienced freedom on a level few on this planet could achieve (health, money, time, and will) the quote rang very true for me.
I think some people grow up in a community and are rooted within that community, but those people are also subject to that community and there is no guarantee that that "community that surrounds you with love" is a good community.
"Always be surrounded by love..." unless you are gay. Gay, trans, atheist, feminist, brown, an opioid addict, a questioner of authority, or otherwise different.
It's not uncommon for members of the trans community to recommend cutting off family members for acts as minor as accidental misgendering, while ignoring the very real harms of social isolation.
As a trans person who's lived in a multi-generational household where only one other member knew I was trans. I can personally attest that even being closeted can be a good tradeoff for many people.
Obviously in cases of violent queerphobia the calculus will be different, but I think people chronically underweigh community and make their own lives worse for it.
There's a reason for the modern resurgence of communes, and it's not just rent. After decades of increasing social isolation we're finally coming back to the realisation that we're social monkeys.
Or a middle-aged white man. https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
One issue I have with the CS Lewis quote is I have been happy at both extremes. Tied down when I was younger was not for me, but now that I'm older I deeply appreciate all the ties I have. I'm not sure I would have gained this appreciation without taking the path it took to get here.
Questioner of authority doesn't belong on that list. All the others are mainstream things with media and political advocacy behind them. The last is a "denier" or "conspiracy theorist".
30 years ago they all might have belonged together (expect we had less racism), 15 years ago I understand why people clung to the idea, today it doesn't make any sense.
There are traveller communities. You hook up, spend time together, split up and meet some of them around the globe later, if you want to.
When you are socially underdeveloped, the strange sheep, the sightly bullied, the not-taken seriously, well it’s not so bad to go twice around the globe a few years and come back.
There’s debate. I’ve lost a lot of social fabric. I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends. But I’m millionaire, own my startup, own my house, and I can get advice on how to manage at work, get a psychologist, etc.
It’s not ideal, and ideally people would have recognized talent at home and/or just included me because I was a living person, but they didn’t seem to have this ethics. Travelling the world taught me what was necessary to give me the social chances that everyone had at home. Now I have weight. I’m not sure I’d have anyone’s respect without money and travels.
So: When home is broken anyway, do follow some dream, yours or not, travelling wasn’t even a dream for me, it will make you a broken soul with broken social fabric, but with more experience.
What an egotistical thing to say. You're not entitled to have people waste time trying to "be friends with you" just because you're financially successful
> I’m workaholic because I don’t have enough friends.
You don't make friends and are workaholic because of it.
I didn't expect this :( Why are you this way? Reading your comment until that point, I thought you'd figured life out.
Being someone who has the odd combination of seeing problems everywhere and yet willing to take risks, it was great for me to do so and break out of my cycle/neighbourhood/city and do things nobody in my family (and extended family) bothered to do. Some things spectacularly failed and left scars that will last a lifetime but taking those risks brought me to places/experiences and gave me a life radically different from my peers in my school/family/background. Its not radical as in taking war time photos as a profession and volunteering for UN between projects, but, sufficiently different from what most people back home are doing.
The trick is to take risks that you have thought about and are convinced about; so even when they don't work out, you are not cursing yourself that you did something you were not 100% willing to do.
And you meet tons of people even if you don't want to, do some cool extreme shit with them which can form bonds much stronger than years of just sitting next to each other in some cubicle/open space.
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It's making a lot of assumptions:
- You have a good relationship with your family
- You have good friends who also didn't move away
- You are genuinely happy with the work you get to do in a town with more limited career choices
- Your location (area and population density) plus salary can support your hobbies
But yes, that is a lot of stars that need to align
https://www.theonion.com/women-explain-why-they-became-tradw...
- Getting married
- Having kids
- Settling down to live in one place
- Finding out how you can participate in the local community, and the actively participate
You will find that people are remarkably open to people who willingly contribute to other's well-being. This is how friends are made, this is how roots are grown.
Edit: formatting
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Are the terms "elite" and "elites" a term with hidden meaning in the US? Is it a republican dogwhistle for democrats?
> My existence really started getting good when I started blowing up my life more regularly, with a substantial eruption every couple of years. I quit my job and moved to Thailand without doing any research about the country, figuring that I could be a bartender again somewhere if it all went south. That ended up becoming the material for my first book. My current professional chapter began when I said “fuck it” to journalism when I couldn’t take the constant ethical compromises and the bullshit of pretending to care about the news cycle. After some flailing, I now make a lot more money and am a lot happier. Blowing up my first marriage was the most difficult one of all, but it was an obviously correct decision, for which my ex-wife later thanked me—we were locked in a pattern that was hurting both of us, and if one of us didn’t walk away, we would’ve eventually been one of those unhappy old couples who constantly radiate bitterness.
Who would ever listen to you though?
I'm like a bird floating in the updrafts to conserve energy but every time the wind changes suddenly, I have to start flapping my wings again and it feels harder each time.
Here another way to look at this advice:
Everyday I run across the road without looking. It's exhilarating! It makes me feel ALIVE! I know all you naysayers say that I should look before crossing the road. I just rip off the band aid and fucking yolo it. I haven't been ran over by a car yet!
Really stupid. My advice is don't listen to this advice. If you are getting itchy feet go on a fucking holiday for a few weeks.
You could also call this quite myopic. How do you know what is out there without trying it yourself? Sitting in your little world and poo poo'ing those who are willing to take a chance. Because yes, from their vantage point, OP is right.
There really is a world out there that few can find but it's worth looking for if you have good reasons to take a chance and put down new roots. Most don't make it because accepting any culture outside of the one of your birth is a very difficult task, and you will never have any true change until you accept a new culture: their customs, their values, their belief systems.
Because really there is quite a lot of variation in those things, and in all the travels I have had, I have only met a few who truly made it. And there is of course a loneliness that comes along with the change, at least for a while. That doesn't mean it isn't worth trying, and if you bit off more than you can chew, just go back home. You obviously need resources to do that, but it's not really as scary as you make it out to be.